HOUSING MATTERS
overcome in the case of the Salt River Market site. It is a struggle to find the patience for the time it takes to get a viable development right. The patience has effectively run out – that much is clear in the work of parties as diverse as Ndifuna Ukwazi and the Municipal Planning Tribunal.
When it does come right, a door will be opened for the transformation of Cape Town. As the City and the province commit to making their inner city land available for the development of social rental and navigate and negotiate the politics, bureaucracies, legalities, procedures and the public to get there, the Salt River Market redevelopment project is in the lead and perhaps, practically speaking, the only real project on the table at this point in time.
Communicare has put its shoulder to the grindstone and currently is confident that it can build over 750 rental units on the site. More than 30 % of these units will be social rental units, 275 units to be precise. More than 80 will be for households that earn less than R5 500 a month. The balance of the flats to rent in the open market will still be affordable in Cape Town terms, with the highest rent being R15 000 a month. Importantly, from the outside, the presence of an established player in providing truly affordable housing in the inner-city area is enormously important and very exciting. As city planners we hope this has a catalytic effect in terms of landing spatially transformative development in the inner city.
Over R1-billion needs to be invested to make this possible, which will come from Communicare, commercial banks and various tiers of government. What is more important however is that we get 750 housing opportunities that are available to lower and middle-income households in perpetuity! This point is one that is often lost when we talk about the expense of building and running well located housing for poorer households.
What is exciting is that the benefits of this development are not limited to housing. Communicare’ s proposals suggest bringing in high quality, safe public space for everyone and neighbourhood shopping alongside this space – both formal and informal trading spaces. Some of the development will retreat to widen the infamous Bromwell Street into an open street for walking, cycling, parking and driving.
The public realm will draw people one level up to an outdoor / indoor resource hub for tenants and broader neighbourhood residents alike. This space will be a place of safety, learning and opportunity. These kind of promises often fall by the wayside as developers struggle to get the numbers to stack up. Communicare is not depending on earning an income from this space to make it work.
What is now on the table is more than what we city planners could dare to have hoped for. It is well located, integrated housing delivery at a density that we have not seen as yet, in Cape Town, in the post-apartheid era. It is the form of development we have no choice but to embrace if a safe, convenient, affordable public transport system is going to be a reality in Cape Town. Perhaps most importantly, the viability of the plan on the table, I am told, is solid. For private developers out there, the yield of this scheme is sitting at 8.24 %, with an internal rate of return of 16 %. This starts to demonstrate a model that might be replicable on state land more widely. The import of this point to shifting the modes of sustainable affordable housing delivery in South Africa cannot to be under estimated.
But … the Salt River market redevelopment project still has to be built, and that will not be before the middle of next year. To get there, and further, will require tenacity, dogged commitment and collaboration between the City of Cape Town, Communicare and the community of Salt River, for the good of all Capetonians – who should rally behind making this happen. Enough of the legal wrangling, enough of the policy dilemmas, enough objections. Let’ s build!
PIXABAY
28
SEPTEMBER- OCTOBER 2018